Yesterday, a discussion arose on the FB group for our local anime group… How many shows had we watched this season? This year? How did this compare to past seasons? Past years?

So, I looked at my records on Anime-Planet and posted the numbers. This morning, on half a cup of coffee, I decided to make a graph and see how it looked. Why? I have no idea, it just seemed like a good idea at the time. “It seemed like a good idea at the time” has gotten me into all sorts of trouble over the years… (I’ll leave the story of the six hour round trip for pizza for another time.) Lack of caffeine doesn’t help much.

Anhow, here ’tis the graph. I apologize in advance, I use Photoshop to edit photographs not create graphics… so some of the add-on annotations I made on top of the Google Sheets graph look a little wonky.

If you’ve read my About page, or followed my twitter, you know I’m into food and cooking and have been exploring pickling and preserving… And you also know from here on the blog that my interests in Japanese culture extend beyond anime.

So, all that comes together in my latest project – making my own miso from scratch.

Welcome to a much belated but still very much worth reading! Frankly, at least in the short-term, if it’s worth reading it ages well.

Both older shows and adaptations are ongoing themes here at Worth Reading, and this week we have a veritable feast on offer.

First up, we have a show that manages to be both – an older show, and an adaptation: over at Anime B&B, Marina reviews Uchuu Senkan Yamato 2199.

This is very timely and very important… because at long last, Yamato 2199 is available as legal stream! Funimation is now streaming a dub, and Crunchyroll is now streaming the sub. Previously it was only legally available as a VERY expensive boxed set.

What is Yamato 2199 and why is it so important? It’s a reboot of the famed 1974 classic Uchuu Senkan Yamato, a seminal show in anime history. It was the first serial anime aimed at adults, and helped pave the way in Japan for anime as we know it today. Over on this side of the pond, it’s dubbed adaptation as Star Blazers helped ignite the passions of the first generations of American otaku.

Forty years on, I can still remember rushing home after school to catch the latest episode… Hurry Star Force, hurry – or the Earth with die. For a young nerd in the midst of the long SF drought of the late 1970’s, those words were magical.

Anyhow, I strongly urge you to at least check out the first few episodes. It’s a crackin’ good adaptation and very good show in its own right. If you like space opera or sci-fi, it should be right up your alley.

Ayron at Reading Between has been doing episodic reviews of Shirobako. He’s got some very keen insights on the show, and they’re worth checking out. He’s also one of the few ani-bloggers and/or Shirobako watchers that I haven’t seen openly advocating tying Tarō to an anchor and dropping him in the middle of Tokyo Bay.

2014 was my first year of watching current season streaming anime… Both posts tug at my nostalgic heartstrings. With Winter 2018 fast approaching, I have my own retrospective project in the works, looking back four years each quarter.

Her’s is a story I’ve heard many times before, different in details but “normal” in the broad brushstrokes. I got lucky. I leapt from 70’s fandom, which was something you stumbled upon if you were very lucky… to 00’s fandom where the ‘net and Google serve up a veritable waterfall. Someday I should write about that early era… shakes cane in the general direction of the kids on his lawn… Which I should be careful doing, though I’ve been around various fandoms for a long time, I’m a relative newb in terms of anime fandom.

Scott at Mech Anime Reviews tackles fandom by categorizing the weaknesses of different types of anime watchers -breaking down different types and how they relate to the community at large. And reminding us that we should watch non-seasonal stuff too… there’s a lot of stuff out there that’s important for various reasons even if it isn’t current.

Reading his listing of genre shows, something interesting occurred to me… Whenever people list off recent shows in the isekai genre, Overlord is always noticeable by its absence. I wonder why that is? Is it because the protagonist’s form is so inhuman or that over the course of the show he gradually loses his humanity and submerges himself into his character? Is it because he so willingly abandons the real world (where he’s a salaryman) in favor of the fantasy world (where he’s very much living out a power fantasy)? Overlord veers sharply away from the assumptions and tropes common to the genre. Of course, it’s always possible that it simply didn’t make that big an impression on English language fandom… But it is getting a second season.